Watchwords: Sightlings and sentimentality

I was watching playoff hockey on TV the other day when a commercial took me by surprise. The ad promotes a business that requires its customers to send a photograph, the image then being captured in a three-dimensional object. In the commercial, the company spokesman peers at the camera and asks, “How do we embed their most sentimental memories inside crystal?”

I’ve always thought of sentimental as a negative word. Among critics and reviewers of the arts, to describe a performance or a piece of writing as sentimental comes close to being the kiss of death.

As the American novelist James Baldwin once wrote: “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty.” It involves an over-the-top wallowing in emotion — the musical or literary equivalent of a cheap cologne or a low-grade bottle of sweet sherry.

This wasn’t always the case. To be sentimental once meant to express refined and tender feelings. The 34 “sentimental waltzes” for piano written by the great 19th-century composer Franz Schubert show little or no trace of ostentatious parading or spurious emotion. Yet somehow “sentimental” went downhill. At least, it did so in English. In French the word has retained more positive connotations. To be “un grand sentimental” in French is to be a hopeless romantic in my language.

The crystal commercial suggests that the word may be on the rebound. Only the severest of critics would deplore a sentimental fondness for a homeland or a mother tongue. Perhaps, too, English-speaking Montrealers are now seeing the word’s meaning blur at the edges under the influence of French. Earlier this year the young Québécois movie director Xavier Dolan told Gazette reporter Brendan Kelly, “I love doing sentimental dramas.” Dolan’s films are intimate and full of feeling; for him, “sentimental” may simply mean emotional.

A friend who surfs the far reaches of the Internet stumbled across a striking remark in a forum for blind people: “I’m going to have to wait until I can get a sightling over here so that I can type in the code.” Until my friend quoted that sentence, “sightling” was an unknown word to me — although it’s one of those rare new expressions whose sense is instantly clear.

Sapling, princeling, hireling: English is full of two-syllable words ending in “ling.” Often the meaning is obvious from the first syllable, but not always: “gos” and “dar” mean nothing on their own.

My suspicion is that among these earlier terms, the most likely inspiration for “sightling” was “halfling,” a synonym for hobbit in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and a word that was enthusiastically adopted by other fantasy authors, including Terry Brooks, Jack Vance and the creators of Dungeons &amp; Dragons. In their imagined realms, humans and other privileged creatures sometimes look on halflings with a mixture of envy and disdain.

That suggests how sightlings are apparently understood by the blind. On the Urban Dictionary website of current slang, a contributor defines the word as: “A somewhat derogatory name for someone who can see well, used by blind people. This term implies that the person so named takes his vision, and the activities that it enables him to do, for granted. A sightling thinks nothing of hopping in his car on a Saturday morning and taking a quick trip to the grocery store to buy some milk. The same task for a blind person takes a day of advanced planning.”

The handful of examples I’ve found online confirm that blind people rarely if ever use “sightling” in a positive spirit. For example, a blog post written by a student with extremely limited vision says that sightlings “discovered that we lived on a sphere-like object. Hundreds of years later they decided to fly to a neighbouring object they call the moon, not because there were desirable items located on it, and not because it was easy, but because it was hard, and to prevent the sightlings on the other side of the sphere from getting there first and planting a symbol no one would be able to see from here.”

Behind the irony, the sense of hurt is palpable. Nothing sentimental about it.

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